Entries for 'Ryan Taylor'

In 2006, the newspaper USA Today included the Internet in its list of the "New Seven Wonders of the World." The Internet has democratized access to vast stores of information in an unprecedented way and has transformed many aspects of education, industry, and society. This glut of information can give tremendous insight into everything from trends in the price of chop sticks to predicting regional flu outbreaks across the globe - if you know how to efficiently access it....

Have you ever opened an Altium project only to discover that a Footprint or Schematic Library file is missing? Maybe your coworker forgot to commit the files to version control, or forgot to include them in the .zip file before leaving for vacation. If so, have no fear: you can recover the footprints easily and automatically.
Schematic Library
From the Schematic Editor, select Design -> Make Schematic Library.
Altium will convert each component on your schematic into a library compon...

As legacy hardware begins to fail, support can be difficult for a variety of reasons - not the least of which is the deprecation of programming software and debugging tools. I recently helped a customer restore the program to an old Telemecanique (now owned by Schneider Electric) XBT-C terminal, and wanted to pass along some lessons I learned. This guide will be for the XBT-C series terminals, but should be similar to other legacy devices as well.
Getting Started
First and foremost, you wi...

Jimmy Condon and I joined E&M on the 2016 edition of their annual New Stuff Road Show to help Siemens showcase their new Modernization Made Easy initiative that was launched this year.
The two-week tour, which stretched from Sacramento to San Diego, was a great opportunity to connect vendors, system integrators, and end-users and give hands-on access to the latest in automation technology.
In addition to answering a wide variety of general automation questions, drinking lots of coffee,...

In order to showcase the talents and interests of each of our office founders in the most Texan way possible, DMC Houston wrote, sang, and recorded an engineering-themed cover and music video of the hit Kenny Chesney song “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”.
While we may have aroused the attention of the building’s security team with cut-off T-shirts, a shotgun, and an overalls-clad hillbilly, the video was produced in good fun over a feast of Whataburger and Shiner Bock.
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One of my absolute favorite things about embedded design is watching a product evolve over the development cycle. From unboxing the first prototype all the way to the release of the deluxe commercial model, each revision of the design poses new and interesting challenges. One of these challenges is managing each revision of the electrical schematic and PCB layout in a way that minimizes human error and maximizes automation.
Altium Designer has an excellent tool to assist the embedded engineer...

Have you noticed your hard drive usage climbing steadily when working with Altium Designer? Here's how you can reduce the disk footprint for each of your PCB projects.
Every time you manually save a schematic sheet or PCB design, Altium saves a local, compressed copy. You can compare between versions from the Storage Manager tab and manually delete versions that you no longer care about. This is generally a useful feature; however, if you are already using a version control tool (like Git...

Howdy, partners! We are very excited to announce that DMC Houston is officially up-and-running! In addition to opening an NYC location, DMC expanded to the Lone Star state this year to better serve our clients across the United States and throughout the world!
Our team arrived in late summer, and we've hit the ground running! Our office space is shaping up nicely, and we had our first Houston status update lunch on our brand-new lunch table.
We've attended career fairs ...

I've never been much of a morning person; some days, the snooze button on my alarm clock works harder than I do. I also like to take public transit to work as often as possible. An unfortunate side effect of my erratic waking habits is that an extra 30 second delay in leaving sometimes results in missing the bus - and arriving (another) 10 minutes late to the office. Recently, I pulled my Raspberry Pi out of storage and picked up a cheap TFT display and set out to cure my morning woes.
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Some rules are meant to be broken.
Unfortunately, none of them apply to PCB design.
Designing and developing printed circuit boards can be an unforgiving process: placing a critical analog line just a few millimeters closer to a noisy clock line might be the difference between a functional widget and an expensive drink coaster. Luckily, many modern software tools provide safeguards to catch critical mistakes before they’re sent out to your favorite PCB fabricator. The most fundamenta...

With Android operating system’s market share growing rapidly, the appeal for developers to release their applications on this platform has never been higher. Android is quite developer friendly, and as it matures the variety of applications has been growing steadily.
Most Android programs (and really most mobile apps), run on the target device and will interact to the outside world over some sort of wireless network: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc. However, a much less common (but equally a...

Like many other students, I considered my TI-89 graphing calculator to be a lifeline during high school calculus and beyond. That device (which I still have and use today) was my first formal introduction to Texas Instruments, and since then I’ve used many of their silicon products. Since joining DMC, I’ve spent a lot of time working with their MSP430 microcontroller line. When I learned that TI would be hosting a Technology Day in Milwaukee, WI, I decided to take the short driv...

After DMC’s second Fed Ex Day, Eric highlighted our 3D Printer. In May, we had an opportunity to show it off at the Tres de Mayo party and I wanted to go into a little more detail about what we’ve learned since the last blog update.
As many tinkerers who have played around with 3D printing will tell you, configuring a machine to produce a high-quality print is part art and part science. Like the original DIY personal computers of the 1970s (we’re looking at you, Altair ...

"Documentation"
The word alone sends shivers down the spine of even the most grizzled engineer and fuels nightmares for the rest of us. Maybe it’s not quite that bad, but keeping accurate and effective documentation is a critical element of any project, and it’s easy to do wrong.
At DMC, we have developed a handful of methods and tricks to fend off the perils of poor documentation when working with Altium Designer. For the second part of my Exploring Altium series, I...

Since joining the DMC team, I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to a wide variety of awesome projects and learn several new technologies. During a recent embedded design project, I was tasked with converting our circuit schematic to a printed circuit board (PCB) layout using a software package called Altium Designer. Altium is a very powerful tool for schematic capture and layout (as well as FPGA design and simulation) with a fantastic support wiki, and I wanted to share some of the tip...